Business analytics need to become easier to use in the future as Australia is faced with an analytics skills shortage that will not go away, according to a Gartner Business Intelligence (BI) and Information Management Summit panel discussion.

BI (business intelligence) vendor Tableau Software on Wednesday announced the availability of Tableau 7.0, a release that boosts speed and scale as well as providing what the company calls "human-oriented" design and accessibility.

Tibco is giving its Spotfire BI (business intelligence) and visualization tool an injection of social collaboration through integrations with Microsoft SharePoint and its own Tibbr enterprise social networking product, the company announced Monday.

A “dodgy” Access database lacking key features required by a growing company led Swisse Vitamins ICT and BI manger, Andrew Millingen, to recognise the need for a fresh start.

Business intelligence vendor, QlikTech, will add social capabilities to its QlikView Business Discovery platform, using Chatter Connect from Salesforce.com to up its collaborative credentials. The idea is to allow users to share information within workgroups and teams.

A second technology making a significant impact on solving Big Data problems is in-memory computing, which takes workloads that were traditionally resident on disk-based storage and moves them into main memory. This delivers a performance improvement many times above that which has been possible previously.

The massive explosion in data volumes collected by many organisations has brought with it an accompanying headache in terms of putting it to gainful use. Businesses increasingly need to make quick decisions, and pressure is mounting on IT departments to provide solutions that deliver quality data much faster than has been possible before. The days of trapping information in a data warehouse for retrospective analysis are fading in favour of event-driven systems that can provide data and enable decisions in real time.